Inspiration
With the rise of self driving cars on the horizon, implementing sensors inside of the car adds to the user experience and expands functionality. With a theme of quantified self in mind, we decided to make a hack that combined these two worlds.
What it does
An application that can be implemented in a self driving car that is capable of detecting a medical emergency as it unfolds using a Muse headband sensor to collect live data about the body and have the car react accordingly. Upon sensing a medical emergency, the car is rerouted to the nearest hospital and the passenger's relevant medical history is sent to the hospital along with the Muse headband data to prepare the personnel for the passenger's arrival.
How I built it
In our hack we use the Muse as an EEG to monitor signal voltages as neurons fire in the brain. In the event of a seizure signal voltages will drop drastically allowing us to record a medical emergency as it unfolds. Using these live data points we wrote a program in JavaScript and node.js that determines when abnormal behavior is recorded. This abnormal behavior is then communicated to our web based app hosted on a .tech domain. The user is prompted to reflect on their health and has the option to dismiss the abnormality if there is nothing wrong. In the event that they are unable to respond to the prompt, after 10 seconds the web app will proceed to send medical history and information to whatever google maps API determines is the nearest hospital so that they can prepare for the patient's arrival. Finally the app will communicate with a GPS to reroute the self driving car to the nearest hospital.
Challenges I ran into
At the start of this hackathon, one of us knew nothing about programming and the other two had virtually no knowledge of back-end development. It's safe to say that this was an awesome learning experience. Communicating between our JavaScript function that was analyzing the raw data and the website was tough, and sending a text from our webpage was also difficult (Twilio was not working well for some reason).
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
Gaining a much greater understanding of back-end development, getting experience working with Firebase and Muse, and learning some PHP are all things we're proud of.
What I learned
Back-end development, PHP scripting, Firebase, Node.js, Ajax, Twilio, Muse
What's next for MediRoute
As this app could potentially help save lives, we would be incredibly happy to see it or a similar idea hit a real market.
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